Latest version of Roon core on a 2018 Mac mini running Monterey.
Networking Gear & Setup Details
Connected Audio Devices
Number of Tracks in Library
Description of Issue
Hi folks,
Roon is constantly downloading hundreds of megabytes of data and writing it to my disk. Even when not music is playing it’s downloading 10 megabits of data a second.
Roon is not backing up, not updating graphics, or any other background files. It’s just sitting there. Even then, with or without music playing, the data download and writing continue. I woke up this morning with less than one gigabyte of storage left on my main hard disk.
Any idea what could be causing this or how to stop it? Thanks for your help.
Roon is automatically updating the rich metadata you’re paying for with your subscription. To stop it, pull the plug, log out, or stop paying. Otherwise let it do it’s thing, after the initial scan things will settle down.
The initial scan is long past. This is new behavior. And it’s not settling down. It’s getting worse.
When Roon is updating as you describe, it usually shows a progress indicator. There’s no such indicator while this behavior I’m describing is going on.
As @mikeb has mentioned, this is most likely normal behaviour but, if you want to check, take a look at the size of the RoonServer folder in your user Library folder.
~/Libary/RoonServer
This can get quite large (it depends on the size of your library) but shouldn’t be more that tens of GB at the most.
Also, as you may already be aware, you’re likely to run into problems if you have only a small amount of space left on your hard drive. If there’s anything you can delete, or move to another drive, I’d suggest doing so. Aim for somewhere between 15% and 20% free space.
For context: 26.6k track library, 2230 albums (85% local, 15% Qobuz): 3GB RoonServer folder. Downstream traffic is in the 10s of Kbps except when streaming from Qobuz.
Is anything else changing your audio files, as soon as you alter a file Roon sees it as a new file and updates itself, things like external metadata changes ?
Does it stop if you quit Roon altogether?
How much disk space does your Roon folder occupy?
EDIT:
Hopefully, your Roon watched folders do not include the Roon database backup folders - I seem to remember posts, where that caused similar problems.
For example my RoonServer “Database” folder is approximately 1.6 GB in size - including the “images_1” folder 1.2 GB in size.
Maybe somehow my Roon setup could be persuaded not to accumulate so many pictures on my disk?
Thanks all for the info and ideas. The writes have slowed a bit. I did some addtional checking based what you all shared.
My Roon folder is 6.5 gigs. Of that, almost 5gigs are images.
Roon is only watching one folder on an external drive.
I’ve double checked where back ups are stored, and reduced the saved.
One big question remains - why would Roon need to write 2.5 gigs of data to my HD in the past 12 hours? 5 gigs of data each data is a lot of SSD wear.
I’ll keep watching this and report back. This happened a few months ago and the only solve then was to wipe the disk and do a clean install of macOS and Roon.
Somewhat related - I finally got rid of Logitech Media Server, and that has also helped slow the writes to the HD.
This all sounds normal to me. I don’t know the exact mechanism as to how Roon updates things, but if there are changes to the metadata for any of your albums (text, hyperlinks, images etc) then this will be downloaded to update your database. If it sticks at 5GB a day - every day - this might be worth looking into, but if it’s every once in a while I don’t think you have anything to worry about.
It’s probably also worth mentioning that an average SSD has a lifetime write limit of somewhere around 100TB. To put that in perspective: writing 5GB a day would wear out your SSD in around 54 years.
